The Melbourne Institute Data Lab, a Secure Access Environment for Informing Future Social and Economic Policy

Abstract

Policy analysts and academics play a critical role in informing policy design, implementation and evaluation. They apply their understanding of current social and economic issues, test theoretical frameworks and present new ideas that are a part of the ecosystem for promoting and sustaining efficient and equitable delivery of government programs. Enabling these roles through access, curation and analysis of data from multiple sources is a critical component of a well-developed analytic framework. This is particularly imperative as it relates to sensitive and proprietary data. Making these data more widely available unlocks many public benefits, but only if the risks associated with sharing data are properly managed. We introduce the Melbourne Institute Data Lab (the MIDL), a secure access environment that supports customisation of information security controls to balance between privacy and security, and user experience to support data-driven research for informing policy. MIDL is based in a university setting, which is an important feature given that universities are long-standing institutions that are independent and trusted for their endeavour to undertake non-biased research.